INDEPENDENT - LONDON
Eichmann memoirs to be released by Israelis
Phil Reeves in Jerusalem
02/29/2000
The Independent - London
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
THE MEMOIRS of Adolf Eichmann will be released to the world today, nearly
four decades after the Nazi leader penned them inside an Israeli jail as he
waited to be hanged for his part in the murder of millions of Jews in the
Holocaust.
Israel has dramatically accelerated an earlier plan to publish the
manuscript, and is releasing it immediately in the hope of helping an
American professor defend herself in a libel case brought in London by the
right-wing historian David Irving.
Israel's state archivist, Evyatar Friesel, said yesterday that the 1,300-
page document - which is written in German and has so far been examined by
only a handful of scholars - would be released to the public in Israel for
the first time today. Earlier, Israel had planned to give the memoirs to a
German research institute to prepare them for publication, along with
lengthy historical footnotes - a process that could have taken months.
But the attorney-general, Elyakim Rubinstein, said he had concluded that
Israel had a moral obligation to help Professor Deborah Lipstadt defeat the
lawsuit, which was brought by Mr Irving after she branded him a Holocaust
denier in her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth
and Memory.
The Jewish state had a commitment to give the public access to the memoirs,
he said - "all of us being survivors of the Holocaust".
Exactly how useful the document will be to Professor Lipstadt and her
co-defendant, Penguin Books, remains to be seen. The attorney general said
that, in it, Eichmann - chief organiser of the SS's anti- Jewish policies -
states that the Nazi killing of the Jews was the worst crime in the history
of mankind.
The Nazi, who was abducted in 1960 by Mossad secret agents from Argentina
and then tried in Israel and hanged, also provided details of the workings
of the death camps and an insight into how decisions were made in the Third
Reich, said Mr Rubinstein.
One of the points at issue in the British Holocaust trial is whether Hitler
personally ordered the Final Solution. David Irving contends that there is
no evidence that the Fuhrer did so.
Although the outspoken British historian accepts that more than one million
Jews died, he has also disputed whether millions of Jews were gassed in
concentration camps. Israel clearly hopes that the Eichmann papers will add
to the evidence that systematic mass slaughters occurred.
The few who have examined the documents during the decades in which they in
the Israeli state archives have indicated that there is little fresh
material in them that was not already used by Eichmann in his trial, which
was public.
The defence mounted by the former Nazi - who oversaw the transport of
millions of Jews to the gas chambers - was that he was a mere cog in the
killing machine, only obeying orders. He became the first and only man to be
hanged in the 52-year history of the Israeli state.
Israel's leading historian of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, last night said
the memoirs contained no new materials, adding that there was no good reason
why they should not have been published before.
While the decision to publish will delight Second World War historians, it
will not be greeted with any joy by Eichmann 's family - in particular his
elder son, Dieter, who has in the past threatened legal action to claim the
manuscript as family property. Israeli officials are also concerned the
documents will be used by neo-Nazis to support Eichmann .
Caption: Eichmann : Killings were `worst crime in history'
TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL
International News WORLD REPORT ISRAEL
Eichmann diaries to be released today
02/29/2000
The Globe and Mail
Jerusalem -- Executed Nazi "technician of death" Adolf Eichmann called the
Holocaust a terrible crime against humanity in prison memoirs that Israel
kept secret for nearly 40 years but plans to reveal today.
A transcript of the memoirs, written by Eichmann as he awaited hanging for
war crimes in 1962, will be released on computer disks in the original
German. Reuters
GUARDIAN - LONDON
Eichmann diary to test Irving case: Long-neglected Nazi memoir brought in as
Holocaust proof
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG IN JERUSALEM AND STUART MILLAR
02/29/2000
The Guardian
A long-neglected prison memoir by Adolf Eichmann , written soon before the
execution of the man who devised the systematic extermination of Europe's
Jews, was on its way to London last night, as evidence in a trial which puts
the Nazi genocide under the microscope.
Israeli justice ministry officials said the diary, on computer disk as well
as in manuscript form, was being sent to help the defence of an American
academic, Deborah Lipstadt , and Penguin Books in a libel suit brought by
the author David Irving, who denies the Nazi leadership systematically
murdered millions of Jews.
Locked away and almost forgotten for 40 years, the diary runs to 1,300 pages
in Eichmann 's Gothic handwriting. It was written in the months between his
conviction, and his execution in 1962, and for decades was seen only by a
handful of scholars. They say it is a meticulous and detailed record of the
ghettoes, cattle train cars and death camps of eastern Europe that were the
Nazis' Final Solution.
'There was no denial of the Holocaust there. He tried to show that he was a
minor cog in the machine and he had to obey orders, but he describes how
terrible it was," said Gavriel Bach, who was the first person to read the
diary. 'In court he admitted it was the most terrible crime in history. He
says how he almost fainted when he saw the geysers of blood coming out of
the bodies in the ditches.'
Mr Bach, who was assistant prosecutor during the Eichmann trial, which took
place in a Jerusalem theatre, was charged with reading the manuscript to see
if it added to the mountain of evidence - 3,000 pages from about 100
witnesses - gathered during the proceedings. During the investigations, Mr
Bach, whose family fled Berlin in 1938, was Eichmann 's main contact with
the outside world and questioned him almost daily.
He was among the scholars and justice ministry officials who decided on
Sunday night that the diary should be made pub lic immediately to aid in Ms
Lipstadt 's defence on a libel suit arising from a book published in 1993
that calls Mr Irving a 'Nazi partisan" for denying the organised murder of
Europe's Jews. Ms Lipstadt 's defence team is believed to have been keen to
have the diaries before the court to test arguments by Mr Irving for which
he has cited Eichmann as evidence.
In court 37 of the high court, it is the interpretation of the new
historical documents that will matter.
Mr Irving is understood to be one of the few people to have detailed
knowledge of Eichmann 's account. According to his website, he was handed
two packets containing 426 pages of Eichmann typescripts by a member of the
senior Nazi's family in Buenos Aires during a lecture tour of Argentina in
1991.
He has used parts of this account to back up his arguments that there was no
systematic genocide and that Hitler had no knowledge of any mass killings of
Jews. In a 1997 letter to Robert Jan van Pelt, a Canadian Holocaust
historian, Mr Irving cited the memoirs to cast doubt on the existence of gas
chambers. The letter, published on his internet site, claims that while
Eichmann , the architect of the extermination programme, makes reference to
witnessing an 'experimental" truck gassing, he was never shown a gas chamber
at Auschwitz.
While the Eichmann memoir seeks to deny the Nazi officer's responsibility
for mass murder, it does not disclaim the systematic murder of millions.
'There is nothing there that would lead anyone to the conclusion that this
did not happen,' Mr Bach said.
Eichmann begins his record in his childhood and writes about his entry into
the SS and his oath of allegiance. 'He wanted his family to see it, and to
see his role. Maybe he wanted to convince his family he did not take a
central part in the Final Solution,' Mr Bach said.
But after Eichmann was hanged in 1962 - the only time Israel has carried out
the death penalty - and his ashes scattered over the Mediterranean, the
manuscript lay forgotten in the Israeli national archives in Jerusalem.
'Nobody was aware of this document,' said Ido (correct) Baum, a spokesman
for the justice ministry. No one was aware of the fact that the notes were
in the archives until last August when Dieter Eichmann , Eichmann 's son,
approached the attorney general and requested the manuscript.
According to Mr Bach, the prevailing sentiment in Israel at the time was
against the immediate publication of the memoir, but there was never any
intention to bury it in the archives indefinitely. 'We always knew that
sooner or later the diaries would be published,' he said.
Typewritten versions of the manuscript could be made available to scholars
and journalists as early as tomorrow.
Although Israel does not intend general publication of the manuscript, it is
unclear what Eichmann 's sons envisage. Mr Baum said last night that the
copyright remained with the Eichmann family.
###
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Associated Press State & Local Wire
February 29, 2000, Tuesday, PM cycle 05:14 Eastern Time
Nazi leader Eichmann described Holocaust as biggest crime in history
by KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: JERUSALEM
Overseer of Nazi death camps Adolf Eichmann described the Holocaust as the
biggest crime in history, but portrayed himself as only a small cog who had
no choice but to follow orders, according to his prison memoirs released
today by Israel.
Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who historians say played a key role in the
genocide of 6 million Jews, penned the 1,300-page manuscript in the months
leading up to his 1962 execution by Israel. It was titled "False Gods," an
apparent reference to his claims that he had been blinded and led astray by
Nazi ideology.
Although long reluctant to release the document, Israel relented so that it
could be used as evidence in a pending libel suit against Emory University
professor Deborah Lipstadt.
British historian David Irving says a book by Lipstadt maintains that he
denies the Holocaust and distorts statistics. Irving said he does not deny
Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of
Jewish concentration camp deaths.
The case is being tried in a British court.
Leading Holocaust scholars in Israel have argued the document has no
historic value because Eichmann distorted events to diminish his own role.
The manuscript had been locked up for nearly four decades in Israel's State
Archives because Israeli leaders feared the writings could be misused by
Holocaust deniers or that Eichmann's family could profit from its publication.
Several months ago, Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein agreed to
give the manuscript to a German research institute, which was to eventually
publish it with footnotes.
Rubinstein changed his mind and agreed to an immediate publication without
restrictions after he was asked to help Lipstadt.
The document has already been forwarded to Lipstadt, and Israeli Justice
Ministry spokesman Ido Baum said today he expected the memoirs to be entered
as evidence in the case.
Israel hopes the memoirs will help bolster legal arguments about the killing
process at the death camps. Baum said Lipstadt's attorneys were especially
interested in passages where Eichmann is more forthcoming than in his trial
on the workings of the camps.
In his introduction, Eichmann wrote that he witnesses the "gruesome workings
of the machinery of the death machine; gear meshed with gear, like clockwork."
The Nazi leader, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina and
brought to trial in Israel in 1960, said the Holocaust "was the most
enormous crime in the history of mankind," but immediately diminished his
own role.
He said he felt a need to give his own account "because I have seen hell,
death and the devil, because I had to watch the madness of destruction,
because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape
left or right because of the will of the driver."
Today's publication of the document - the State Archives handed out computer
disks with the material - was met with some criticism.
Amos Hausner, whose father, Gideon, had prosecuted Eichmann, questioned the
wisdom of using the memoirs in court. "We still have many Holocaust
survivors with us. They can testify on the gas chambers," said Hausner. "But
instead of believing those people, we take the document of a Nazi criminal
before he was executed."
Yehuda Bauer, head of the Holocaust research institute at Yad Vashem,
Israel's Holocaust memorial, said Eichmann changed his tune to win favor
with his Israeli captors.
Bauer said that in an interview Eichmann granted five years before the
trial, while still a free man, the Nazi leader said he regretted he hadn't
taken harsher measures against the Jews and that the creation of the state
of Israel was a catastrophe.
"There is nothing to be learned from this" document, Bauer told Israel army
radio. "This is a demon who writes with a pitiful justification that repeats
his claims in court."
In a separate section of papers released today, Eichmann gives instructions
to his lawyer to pass on to a future publisher. Eichmann said he preferred
an editor familiar with Bavarian idioms. He said he felt most comfortable
with a light writing style, but that "respecting the nature of the subject,"
this was not practical.
He asked that his wife get 10 copies of the book, so she could pass them on
to friends and his sons. The book should have the dedication, "At the
request of my husband, with best wishes" and the remark, "That's the way it
was," he wrote.
NEWSDAY
Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc. Newsday (New York, NY)
February 29, 2000, Tuesday NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
EICHMANN'S MEMOIRS SET FOR RELEASE TODAY
REUTERS
Jerusalem-Executed Nazi "technician of death" Adolf Eichmann called the
Holocaust a terrible crime against humanity in prison memoirs Israel kept
secret for nearly 40 years, but which it plans to reveal today.
A transcript of the memoirs, which have been kept under lock and key since
Eichmann was hanged in 1962, will be released to the public by the State
Archives on computer disks in the original German. Even the spelling
mistakes will be left intact.
Eichmann, who organized the trains that carried millions to their deaths in
concentration camps, wrote the 600-odd pages of neatly bound manuscript in
Gothic-style lettering from a prison cell as he awaited hanging for war
crimes in the only execution in Israel's history.
In advance of the memoirs' release, State Archivist Evyatar Friesel hinted
at their content yesterday: "He wrote those memoirs as a very efficient
bureaucrat ... He described it the Holocaust as one of the worst crimes
against humanity and the worst crime perpetuated against the Jewish people."
Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, one of a handful of scholars allowed to
study the memoirs, says Eichmann tried to play down his role in the
Holocaust in the hope he would be granted a stay of execution.
Bauer said Eichmann continued the line of defense he pleaded from the
bullet-proof glass box where he sat during his 1961 Jerusalem trial. "His
whole argument that he was a small cog in the machine was disproved in the
trial," Bauer said.
Eichmann's account of the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews is already on its
way to a British legal team fighting a libel suit waged by a controversial
historian in a case that many Jews fear puts the Holocaust itself on trial.
David Irving is suing author Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for her book
on Holocaust deniers that described Irving as "a dangerous spokesman for
Holocaust denial." Irving said he was slandered by the reference. In a
recent interview, Irving told Reuters the Auschwitz concentration camp was a
sort of "Disneyland," built by Polish communists after World War II to
attract tourists.
Lipstadt's legal team sent an urgent message to Israel's Justice Ministry,
asking for permission to present the Eichmann memoirs as evidence in the
London court hearing the case. Copyright 2000 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London) February 29, 2000
The man who came to symbolise an evil regime
As head of the Gestapo's department B4, Adolf Eichmann organised the 'final
solution' to the 'Jewish problem' and in doing so he, perhaps more than any
other Nazi, redefined our conception of evil.
But the man dragged into an Israeli courtroom and then executed in 1962 did
not square with anyone's idea of a monster; he seemed neither a sadistic
bully, nor a sinister intellectual. He claimed he had no stomach for the
reality of genocide.
Sent to Chelmno in 1942 to report on the use of gas vans, he said, 'I
couldn't even look at it. All the time I was trying to avert my gaze from
what was going on The screaming and shrieking '
Eichmann did what he was told, even when the orders he received were
inhumane. 'I was a relatively young man and used to being led, in business
and in everything else', he later said.
A failure at school and college, Eichmann drifted through a variety of jobs
before being recruited into the SS in 1932 at a beer hall rally in Linz, his
own, and Hitler's home town. He became the SS intelligence service's leading
expert on Jewish issues. In 1938 got his first important post when he was
put in charge of the deportation of Jews from Vienna.
There is evidence that, as late as the mid-1930s, Eichmann's own solution to
the 'Jewish problem' was essentially non-violent. 'The Zionists wanted a
territory where the Jewish people could finally settle in peace. And that
was pretty much what the Nazis wanted,' he said.
Yet the same man who had once applied for SS money to study Hebrew with a
rabbi became someone who, in the closing stages of the second world war,
could say of the mass graves: 'I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing
that in that same pit there are 5m (sic) enemies of the state'.
The imminent release of his memoirs is important because they promise an
insight into one of the most disturbing minds of the Third Reich.
John Hooper
AGENCE FRANCE PRESS
Copyright 2000 Agence France Presse Agence France Presse
February 29, 2000, Tuesday 2:29 AM, Eastern Time
Israel opens Eichmann journal to public after nearly 40 years of secrecy
Tanya Willmer
JERUSALEM, Feb 29 (AFP) - Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann thought the
Holocaust the worst crime in history but he himself guilt-free, according to
his prison memoirs made public by Israel Tuesday after 40 years under lock
and key.
"It's not an apology," Israel's state archivist Professor Evyatar Friesel
told AFP. "He thinks that a terrible crime has been committed but the crime
is not his responsibility and therefore he has nothing to apologise for,
that he was a public servant who had to obey orders."
Attorney General Eliyakim Rubinstein agreed to open up the 1,300-page
document after a request from lawyers in a Holocaust libel case in London
involving controversial British historian David Irving.
"We think as part of Israel's obligation and commitment as a Jewish state,
all of us being survivors in fact of the Holocaust, we felt that we should
enable the public to have access to what was written," Rubinstein said.
The memoirs were handwritten in German on ruled, now slightly yellowing
paper, over the summer of 1961 while Eichmann was in a jail cell awaiting
the verdict in his trial for crimes against humanity.
Eichmann was one of the principal architects of the final solution, the
genocide of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, in charge of organizing
and coordinating the deportation of millions of Jews to the death camps of
eastern Europe.
The manuscript has been kept in a safe at the state archives since Eichmann
was hanged in 1962, the only execution in the Jewish state's history,
following his abduction from Argentina by Israeli agents and trial in
Jerusalem.
"The document was kept in our archives for 40 years and nobody asked for
it," said Friesel, 69, who keeps his office computer perched on a
black-bound copy of "The Trial of Adolf Eichmann."
Freisel says Eichmann was not penning a personal diary as it was clearly
written for public consumption, contained little private or spontaneous
thoughts and was organised in three parts, a biography, an account of events
during the Holocaust, and "philosophical remarks."
The manuscript, now in a cardboard box in Friesel's office, reveals an
intelligent, if not well-educated man, and a highly organised bureaucrat, he
said.
"He was very efficient, I would say horribly efficient. It comes through all
the way through the manuscript. Every page is signed."
The manuscript has been made available by Israel on computer disk for
perusal only, because of uncertainty over the copyright.
The attorney general's office has also despatched a copy to lawyers in
London who are fighting the libel suit by Irving against author Deborah
Lipstadst for her 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust."
Irving, banned from several countries because of his views on the Holocaust,
is suing Lipstadst and the book's publishers Penguin for branding him a
"dangerous spokesman in the service of the Holocaust deniers."
Yeduda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian who had pushed for publication
of the document, described Eichmann's attempt to downplay his role in the
slaughter of millions of Jews as a "pack of lies.
"He says that the murder of Jews was the worst crime in history. But he
presents himself as a small cog in the machine," she told AFP. "I think he
probably hoped it would be published as a counter to the verdict he knew was
coming."
Israel Gutman, chief historian at Yad Vashem, the memorial to the six
million Jews massacred by the Nazis, said he welcomed the disclosure of the
Eichmann documents although he considered they added little to the world's
knowledge of events.
"It is more important for people who ask themselves what kind of human
beings were these murderers, these executioners," said Gutman, a Holocaust
surviovor whose family was wiped out at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Copyright 2000 Associated Press
AP Worldstream February 29, 2000; Tuesday 2:30 AM Eastern Time
Israel releases Eichmann memoirs to help defeat those trying to diminish
scope of Holocaust
KARIN LAUB, Jerusalem
For nearly four decades, Israel locked away Adolf Eichmann's jailhouse
memoir a rambling 1,300-page manuscript with many self-serving passages for
fear it could be misused by Holocaust deniers.
In a sharp about-turn, the Jewish state on Tuesday published the Nazi
leader's account, penned in the shadow of the gallows, to help fight a court
battle against British historian David Irving, who has challenged the scope
of the Nazi genocide.
Israel's State Archives released the Eichmann document at 9:00 a.m. (0700
GMT) Tuesday. Journalists were given a copy in German _ the original is
written by hand in Gothic script via e-mail or on computer disk.
Israel's Justice Ministry said the manuscript has already been forwarded to
American professor Deborah Lipstadt whom Irving has sued for libel. Irving
says a book by Lisptadt maintains that he denies the Holocaust and distorts
statistics. The case is being tried in a British court.
Irving says he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges
the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.
In his memoirs, written in the months leading up to his 1962 death by
hanging in Israel, Eichmann said the Holocaust was the worst crime in
history, according to Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein.
Rubinstein had decided several months ago to release the memoirs with many
restrictions. The manuscript was to be handed to a German research institute
and published months from now as a scholarly work.
Even that decision apparently was made reluctantly, only after one of
Eichmann's sons, Dieter, said he considered taking Israel to court for
holding what he said was his family's property.
Rubinstein said Monday he changed his mind about publication because of the
Lipstadt-Irving case. Israel has a moral obligation to fight those trying to
play down the genocide, said Rubinstein.
The attorney general noted that like many fellow Israelis, he lost family in
the Holocaust. He said his grandparents were buried in a mass grave in Belarus.
However, Amos Hausner, the son of Eichmann's Israeli prosecutor, Gideon
Hausner, questioned the wisdom of using the memoirs in court.
''We still have many of Holocaust survivors with us, they can testify on the
gas chambers,'' said Hausner. ''But instead of believing those people we
take the document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed.''
DEUTSCHE PRESS AGENTUR
Copyright 2000 Deutsche Presse-Agentur Deutsche Presse-Agentur
February 29, 2000, BC Cycle 12:51 Central European Time
Eichmann's handwriting reveals "well-oiled machine": graphologist
Jerusalem
The handwriting of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann revealed a person who
was "a fanatic who worked like a well- oiled machine," an Israeli
graphologist said in an analysis published Tuesday in the Yediot Aharanot
daily.
Graphologist Eliyahu Ben-Tovim, who analysed the handwriting after the
Israeli government made public journals Eichmann wrote in an Israeli prison
while awaiting execution, found that it showed a person who was "dry, petty,
technical, lacking in inspiration and imagination."
"The writer has rigorous self-discipline, his personality is very
well-developed, his horizons are narrow, he is very fanatical, but he has
excellent powers of concentration," asserted Ben-Tovim, who, according to
Yediot, did not know whose handwriting he was analysing.
"The writer's personality is obsessive. He seems to be living for a purpose
to which he concedes his independence ... The person seems to have
extinguished every spark of feeling and of emotion inside himself. It can be
assumed he has no understanding of morality and values," Ben-Tovim said.
The Israeli graphologist also found that based on his handwriting, Eichmann
was "very demanding, judging people in light of their usefulness to matters
he is responsible for."
"It must be emphasized that his intelligence is very impressive, and that
his ways of thinking and of acting are methodical, organized and clear. If a
mature, inspired personality and a rich emotional world had been added to
them, the writer may have developed in the direction of research and
development and perhaps even music," Ben- Tovim concluded.
Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews
during World War II, fled from Germany after the war. Israeli agents tracked
him down in Argentina in 1960, and brought him to Israel to stand trial.
Found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was hanged in 1962. Copyright
2000 Associated Press AP Worldstream February 29, 2000; Tuesday 7:43 AM
Eastern Time
Excerpts from prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, overseer of Nazi death camps
With Israel-Eichmann
Here are excerpts from Adolf Eichmann's 1,300-page prison memoir, released
Tuesday by Israel's State Archives in the original German. The passages were
translated by The Associated Press.
Eichmann played a key role in the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews and was
executed by Israel in 1962. Holocaust historians have dismissed the memoir
as little more a self-serving document.
About the Holocaust:
''I said (in court) that what happened with the Jews, which the government
of the German Reich brought about during the last great war, was the most
enormous crime in the history of mankind.''
''And I witnessed the gruesome workings of the machinery of death; gear
meshed with gear, like clockwork.''
''It was the biggest and most enormous dance of death of all times.''
About his beliefs:
''I had thousands of ideals and I slid, like many others, into a situation
from which there was no exit. Time has given me distance to the events. ...
Many things that were valid then, are no longer valid now. Things I
considered to be basic values, I have thrown overboard over the years.''
About his involvement in the Holocaust:
''Because I have seen hell, death and the devil, because I had to watch the
madness of destruction, because I was one of the many horses pulling the
wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver, I
now feel called upon and have the desire, to tell what happened.''
About his relationship with Jews:
''I was never an antisemite.''
###
==
HA'ARETZ 02.29.00
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=02/29/00&id=70525
Eichmann's diary opens to public today
By Yair Sheleg
Adolf Eichmann's diaries, written while he was on trial and later awaiting
his death sentence, will be opened to the public today at the National
Archive at the same time that a copy heads for London to be presented as
evidence in the case of historian David Irving's libel suit against American
professor Deborah Lipstadt.
Israel's moral obligation to help defeat a lawsuit challenging the scope of
the Holocaust outweighed strong misgivings about publishing the jail-house
memoirs of the Nazi technocrat who organized the transport of millions of
Jews to their death in the concentration camps, Attorney General Elyakim
Rubinstein said yesterday.
The 1,300-page document is already en route to Lipstadt's defense attorneys.
Lipstadt accused British historian David Irving of denying the Nazi genocide
and he is suing her for libel in a British court.
State archivist Evyatar Friesel said the manuscript would be available to
the public starting today and that any publication of it would be the
responsibility of the publisher, since the copyright issues have still not
been resolved. Israeli had initially planned to give the Eichmann memoirs,
locked up for three decades in the state archives, to a German research
institute for publication, a process that was expected to take months, if
not years.
Even that decision was made only reluctantly, after one of Eichmann's sons,
Dieter, threatened legal action to claim the book as family property. Until
now, only a few scholars have seen the memoirs.
Irving has claimed that he had access to another Eichmann diary, written
before his capture by the Mossad in Argentina in the early 1960s.
Some Israeli officials have expressed concern that the document could fall
into the wrong hands and that self-serving passages could be used by
Holocaust deniers. Amos Hausner, whose father Gideon prosecuted Eichmann,
questioned the wisdom of using the documents in court.
"We still have many of Holocaust survivors with us, they can testify on the
gas chambers," Hausner, a lawyer himself, said in a phone interview with the
Associated Press. "But instead of believing those people, we take the
document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed." Irving is suing
Lipstadt for libel in Britain for writing in a 1994 book that he denied the
Holocaust and distorted the truth of what happened in World War II. Irving
says he does not deny that Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the
number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. Lipstadt, a professor
at Emory University in Atlanta, and her codefendant, Penguin Books, deny
libel.
Israel hopes the memoirs will provide more proof of the systematic killing
of Jews by the Nazis, as well as the scope of the genocide. In the trial,
Irving disputed historically accepted witness accounts that hundreds of
thousands were gassed to death at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland.
"We think as part of Israel's obligation and commitment as a Jewish state,
all of us being survivors in fact of the Holocaust, we felt that we should
enable the public to have access to what was written," Attorney General
Rubinstein told reporters.
According to Rubinstein, Eichmann wrote that the killing of the Jews was the
worst crime in the history of mankind. The Nazi leader also provided details
on the workings of the death camps, as well as insight into decision-making
in the Third Reich, Rubinstein said.
Scholars who have seen the memoir say that it repeats arguments Eichmann
made at his trial, insisting that he was only a mid-level official following
orders.
Tom Segev of Ha'aretz, who has written widely on the Holocaust and its
effects on Israeli society, said the decision to release the Eichmann
memoirs should have been made long ago. "The principle must be that no
material on the Holocaust remains locked in the archives," he said. Eichmann
wrote the diary while in jail from 1961 to 1962, after Israeli agents
captured him in Argentina and brought him to trial in Israel. Eichmann was
executed by hanging in 1962.
GUARDIAN 02.29.00
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,141723,00.html
Eichmann diary to test Irving case
The David Irving libel trial: special report
Long-neglected Nazi memoir brought in as Holocaust proof
Suzanne Goldenberg in Jerusalem and Stuart Millar Tuesday February 29, 2000
A long-neglected prison memoir by Adolf Eichmann, written soon before the
execution of the man who devised the systematic extermination of Europe's
Jews, was on its way to London last night, as evidence in a trial which puts
the Nazi genocide under the microscope.
Israeli justice ministry officials said the diary, on computer disk as well
as in manuscript form, was being sent to help the defence of an American
academic, Deborah Lipstadt, and Penguin Books in a libel suit brought by the
author David Irving, who denies the Nazi leadership systematically murdered
millions of Jews.
Locked away and almost forgotten for 40 years, the diary runs to 1,300 pages
in Eichmann's Gothic handwriting. It was written in the months between his
conviction, and his execution in 1962, and for decades was seen only by a
handful of scholars. They say it is a meticulous and detailed record of the
ghettoes, cattle train cars and death camps of eastern Europe that were the
Nazis' Final Solution.
"There was no denial of the Holocaust there. He tried to show that he was a
minor cog in the machine and he had to obey orders, but he describes how
terrible it was," said Gavriel Bach, who was the first person to read the
diary. "In court he admitted it was the most terrible crime in history. He
says how he almost fainted when he saw the geysers of blood coming out of
the bodies in the ditches."
Mr Bach, who was assistant prosecutor during the Eichmann trial, which took
place in a Jerusalem theatre, was charged with reading the manuscript to see
if it added to the mountain of evidence - 3,000 pages from about 100
witnesses - gathered during the proceedings. During the investigations, Mr
Bach, whose family fled Berlin in 1938, was Eichmann's main contact with the
outside world and questioned him almost daily.
He was among the scholars and justice ministry officials who decided on
Sunday night that the diary should be made pub lic immediately to aid in Ms
Lipstadt's defence on a libel suit arising from a book published in 1993
that calls Mr Irving a "Nazi partisan" for denying the organised murder of
Europe's Jews. Ms Lipstadt's defence team is believed to have been keen to
have the diaries before the court to test arguments by Mr Irving for which
he has cited Eichmann as evidence.
In court 37 of the high court, it is the interpretation of the new
historical documents that will matter.
Mr Irving is understood to be one of the few people to have detailed
knowledge of Eichmann's account. According to his website, he was handed two
packets containing 426 pages of Eichmann typescripts by a member of the
senior Nazi's family in Buenos Aires during a lecture tour of Argentina in
1991.
He has used parts of this account to back up his arguments that there was no
systematic genocide and that Hitler had no knowledge of any mass killings of
Jews. In a 1997 letter to Robert Jan van Pelt, a Canadian Holocaust
historian, Mr Irving cited the memoirs to cast doubt on the existence of gas
chambers. The letter, published on his internet site, claims that while
Eichmann, the architect of the extermination programme, makes reference to
witnessing an "experimental" truck gassing, he was never shown a gas chamber
at Auschwitz.
While the Eichmann memoir seeks to deny the Nazi officer's responsibility
for mass murder, it does not disclaim the systematic murder of millions.
"There is nothing there that would lead anyone to the conclusion that this
did not happen," Mr Bach said.
Eichmann begins his record in his childhood and writes about his entry into
the SS and his oath of allegiance. "He wanted his family to see it, and to
see his role. Maybe he wanted to convince his family he did not take a
central part in the Final Solution," Mr Bach said.
But after Eichmann was hanged in 1962 - the only time Israel has carried out
the death penalty - and his ashes scattered over the Mediterranean, the
manuscript lay forgotten in the Israeli national archives in Jerusalem.
"Nobody was aware of this document," said Ido (correct) Baum, a spokesman
for the justice ministry. No one was aware of the fact that the notes were
in the archives until last August when Dieter Eichmann, Eichmann's son,
approached the attorney general and requested the manuscript.
According to Mr Bach, the prevailing sentiment in Israel at the time was
against the immediate publication of the memoir, but there was never any
intention to bury it in the archives indefinitely. "We always knew that
sooner or later the diaries would be published," he said.
Typewritten versions of the manuscript could be made available to scholars
and journalists as early as tomorrow.
Although Israel does not intend general publication of the manuscript, it is
unclear what Eichmann's sons envisage. Mr Baum said last night that the
copyright remained with the Eichmann family.
==
Israel releases Eichmann memoirs to help defeat those trying to diminish
scope of Holocaust
By KARIN LAUB 02/29/2000
Associated Press Newswires Copyright 2000. The Associated Press.
All Rights Reserved.
JERUSALEM (AP) - For nearly four decades, Israel locked away Adolf Eichmann
's jailhouse memoir - a rambling 1,300-page manuscript with many
self-serving passages - for fear it could be misused by Holocaust deniers.
In a sharp about-turn, the Jewish state is now releasing the Nazi leader's
account, penned in the shadow of the gallows, to help fight a court battle
against British historian David Irving, who has challenged the scope of the
Nazi genocide.
Israel's State Archives is to publish the Eichmann document at 9:00 a.m.
(0700 GMT) Tuesday. Journalists are to receive a typed copy in German - the
original is written by hand in Gothic script - via e-mail or on computer
disk.
Israel's Justice Ministry said the manuscript has already been forwarded to
American professor Deborah Lipstadt whom Irving has sued for libel. Irving
says a book by Lisptadt maintains that he denies the Holocaust and distorts
statistics. The case is being tried in a British court.
Irving says he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges
the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.
In his memoirs, written in the months leading up to his 1962 death by
hanging in Israel, Eichmann said the Holocaust was the worst crime in
history, according to Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein.
Rubinstein had decided several months ago to release the memoirs with many
restrictions. The manuscript was to be handed to a German research institute
and published months from now as a scholarly work.
Even that decision apparently was made reluctantly, only after one of
Eichmann 's sons, Dieter, said he considered taking Israel to court for
holding what he said was his family's property.
Rubinstein said Monday he changed his mind about publication because of the
Lipstadt -Irving case. Israel has a moral obligation to fight those trying
to play down the genocide, said Rubinstein.
The attorney general noted that like many fellow Israelis, he lost family in
the Holocaust. He said his grandparents were buried in a mass grave in
Belarus.
However, Amos Hausner, the son of Eichmann 's Israeli prosecutor, Gideon
Hausner, questioned the wisdom of using the memoirs in court.
"We still have many of Holocaust survivors with us, they can testify on the
gas chambers," said Hausner. "But instead of believing those people we take
the document of a Nazi criminal before he was executed."
==
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia 02.29.00
[reprinted from the Telegraph - London]
Israel offers up Eichmann to skewer Irving
http://www.smh.com.au:80/news/0002/29/text/world15.html
Date: 29/02/2000
Israel has authorised the release of the unpublished prison memoir of Adolf
Eichmann, architect of the Nazis' "Final Solution" for the extermination of
European Jewry, for use by lawyers refuting the British libel suit mounted
by historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.
The memoir has been locked away in Israeli archives since Eichmann was
hanged in 1962, the only time Israel has imposed the death penalty.
According to the few researchers who have seen the document, written between
Eichmann's conviction by a district court and his appeal to the Supreme
Court, Eichmann offers a detailed description of the systematic attempt to
exterminate European Jews.
He minimises his role, describing himself as a minor cog in the Nazi killing
machine.
Forgotten over four decades, the document resurfaced last year when one of
Eichmann's sons asked for it. The Israeli Attorney-General, Mr Elyakim
Rubinstein, son of Holocaust survivors, decided instead that the handwritten
notes would be made available to the public, and agreed to rush a copy to
American scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who is being sued by Irving in the London
trial.
Israel's Justice Ministry said the defence team in the libel case had asked
for the memoir to be released. A decision to hand it over was taken at a
meeting on Sunday.
A 600-page transcription was recently completed, according to a Justice
Ministry spokesman.
Lawyers for Lipstadt, a Holocaust specialist at Emory University, had sought
the manuscript.
In a 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory, Lipstadt called Irving a "Hitler partisan" for his assertions that
the Nazis did not carry out genocide against Jews in World War II, that
Hitler knew of no mass killings of Jews, and that Hitler was no more guilty
of war crimes than was Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt.
Holocaust experts in Israel say the document could be crucial to Lipstadt's
defence, as it refutes Irving's charges that hundreds of thousands of Jews -
far fewer than the commonly accepted figure of 6 million - were killed in
haphazard incidents on the Eastern front of the war, often at the hands of
local residents rather than in concentration camps.
The rest of the Jewish population may have fled to what would become Israel,
Irving has said, accusing Jews of turning the myth of a meticulously planned
and executed genocide into "big business".
With the burden of proof under British law on Lipstadt, the defendant,
commentators have noted that the Holocaust itself is on trial, making the
current case an extraordinarily important one in the annals of Holocaust
denial.
Given Eichmann's efforts to downplay his role, Israeli officials declined to
publish the memoir in 1962 to avoid accusations that they had executed an
innocent man. In a statement on Sunday night, however, Mr Rubinstein said
the state had a "historic duty" to make the material public and send it to
Lipstadt's aid.
The trial, which began on January 11, is expected to continue for another
two weeks.
The Telegraph, London
REUTERS 12 Noon EST 02.29.00
ISRAEL: Eichmann acknowledged Holocaust "dance of death".
By Paul Holmes
02/29/2000
Reuters English News Service
(C) Reuters Limited 2000.
PHOTO of Diaries
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20000229/wl/mdf53085.html
JERUSALEM, Feb 29 (Reuters) - Adolf Eichmann recognised the Holocaust as the
greatest crime in history before an Israeli hangman placed a noose around
his neck in 1962 but never acknowledged his own guilt in the genocide of six
million Jews.
Prison memoirs written by Eichmann in the months that led up to his
execution for crimes against the Jewish people and humanity paint a chilling
picture of what he calles "the greatest and most violent dance of death of
all time".
"I want this only to be a warning," Eichmann wrote in a manuscript to which
he gave the title "False Gods".
"Words of warning are neither honey nor milk. They are hard and dry like the
thorn bushes of the Pampas or like bleached bones in the desert."
But the voluminous writings, made public by Israel on Tuesday for use in a
Holocaust denial trial in London, reveal no sense of personal responsibility
for the Nazi German death machine that worked to wipe out Europe's Jews.
Instead, the man sentenced to hang by an Israeli court for his part in
organising the Holocaust depicts himself as a troubled soul who fought with
his conscience in the face of evil and lost to a misguided compulsion to do
Adolf Hitler's bidding.
He describes himself variously as a cog in the giant wheel of the Third
Reich, a man hitched like a horse to a wagon driven by others and a
"playball of circumstances".
"My position is the same as that of millions of others who had to obey," he
writes. "The difference is simply that I had a much more difficult task to
perform in carrying out my orders."
REUTERS 02.29.00
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000229/wl/israel_eichmann_3.html
Israel Releases Memoirs of Nazi Murderer Eichmann
By Christine Hauser
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel released the prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann
on Tuesday, nearly 40 years after the Nazi ''technician of death'' was
hanged for war crimes in the only execution in Israel's history.
A transcript of the memoirs was released to the public by the State Archives
on computer discs in the original German.
``It was not a secret,'' State Archivist Evyatar Friesel said. ``The memoirs
were kept in state archives and we decided after so many years to open them.
Everybody can read them for perusal.''
The disclosure of the diaries was approved by Attorney-General Elyakim
Rubinstein on Sunday after intensive deliberations with legal experts and
historians.
Eichmann's account of the Nazi mass murder of Jews during World War Two is
to be used by a British legal team fighting a libel suit brought by
controversial historian David Irving in a case that many Jews fear puts the
Holocaust itself on trial.
Irving is suing U.S. writer Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for a 1995
book on Holocaust deniers which described him as ``a dangerous spokesman for
Holocaust denial.''
Irving recently told Reuters that Auschwitz concentration camp was a sort of
``Disneyland,'' built by Polish communists after World War Two to attract
tourists.
1,100 Pages Of Memoirs
Lipstadt's legal team asked Israel's Justice Ministry for permission to
present the memoirs as evidence in the case.
Only a handful of historians have had access to the Eichmann memoirs.
Eichmann, who organized the trains which took millions of Nazi victims to
their deaths in concentration camp gas chambers, wrote the 1,100 pages of
manuscript and draft notes in longhand in the summer of 1961 while he was in
jail awaiting the verdict in his trial.
Eichmann calls the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's systematic extermination of six
million Jews during World War Two, a terrible crime against humanity,
according to an archive synopsis.
Friesel said his job was only to release the manuscript and not to comment
on it. ``The public can judge for themselves. I expect everything from
indifference to excitement.''
Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper columnist Tom Segev said the newspaper tried for
years to see the document but was denied access for legal reasons concerning
copyrights. Segev said he thought the manuscript was withheld because there
were fears it would serve neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
``Very Orderly Autobiography''
``Our position was it is inconceivable the state of Israel would not make
public a document related to the Holocaust,'' Segev said as he read the
document on Tuesday.
``It strikes me as a very orderly autobiography, including very, very exact
directions for the publisher, including the color of the jacket,'' said
Segev, author of a book on Israel and the Holocaust.
Eichmann was kidnapped from his Argentine hideaway by Israeli Mossad agents
and brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1960.
In the manuscript Eichmann stresses that he was never anti-Semitic nor
hostile to foreigners, according to the synopsis.
A biographical account describes deportation and exterminations of Jews from
Germany and his attempts to refute evidence against him in the trial.
He tells of private connections with Jews and attempts to learn Hebrew in
order to gain information from the Jewish press.
Eichmann recounts the extermination of Jews after the outbreak of World War
Two and his need to consume large quantities of alcohol after witnessing
their killings by gas and shootings.
``Of course it's chilling. What else?'' Segev said. ``There it is, the
killer talking.''
A former travelling salesman who sold vacuum cleaners, Eichmann rose in the
Nazi Party ranks to direct the deportations of European Jews from across
Europe to death camps as head of the Department of Jewish Affairs at Gestapo
headquarters.
His writings are largely an attempt to disprove that he had a
decision-making role in the genocide and argue that he had no personal
animosity towards Jews.
KILLINGS AT AUSCHWITZ
The account, in places autobiographical and at times rambling and
pseudo-philosophical, nonetheless contains grim insights into how the Nazis
perpetrated the Holocaust.
Eichmann recounts how he was assigned in early 1942 to visit the Auschwitz
death camp in Poland and report back to superiors on the killing of Jews.
Methods were still crude but a gruesome foretaste of the factory-style gas
chambers and crematoria that were to follow.
"Hoess, the Kommandant, told me that he used sulphuric acid to kill. Round
cotton wool filters were soaked with this poison and thrown into the rooms
where the Jews were assembled. The poison was instantly fatal.
"He burned the corpses on an iron grill, in the open air. He led me to a
shallow ditch where a large number of corpses had just been burned."
In another section, Eichmann tells how around the same time he befuddled his
mind with alcohol after witnessing the machine-gunning of a large number of
Jews near Minsk.
"As I arrived I saw a Jewish woman with a small child in her arms in the
ditch. I wanted to snatch out the child but a bullet smashed into the
child's skull. My driver wiped small pieces of brain from my leather coat,"
Eichmann wrote.
"I got into my car. 'To Berlin,' I told the driver. But I drank schnaps as
if it were water. I had to drink. I had to numb myself. And I thought of my
own children..."
Born in Solingen, Germany in 1906, Eichmann moved to Austria with his
parents when he was eight years old. He joined the Nazi party in 1932 and
became a member of the SS.
In 1934, he was assigned as an SS corporal in the Dachau concentration camp
and later that year joined the Secret Service (SD).
As a member of the SD's Jewish Section, Eichmann recounts how he tried to
learn Yiddish and Hebrew and travelled to Palestine to gather intelligence
on Zionist aspirations.
Eichmann was sent to Austria in 1938, after it became part of the Third
Reich, on a mission to force Jews to emigrate. He carried out the same task
a year later in Czechoslovakia.
By 1942, Eichmann had been given extensive powers to direct the deportations
of European Jews to death camps.
NEVER AGAIN
Eichmann 's account of the Nazi mass murder of Jews during World War Two is
to be used by a British legal team fighting a libel suit brought by
controversial historian David Irving in a case that many Jews fear puts the
Holocaust itself on trial.
Irving is suing U.S. writer Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for a 1995
book on Holocaust deniers which described him as "a dangerous spokesman for
Holocaust denial".
Eichmann 's memoirs, which the Israeli state archives released in the
original German, come across in places as a plea for humanity never to
embark on the same evil again.
Eichmann muses at one point on the need for a worldwide government committed
to peace and harmony, set up by women if men prove unsuited to the task.
He recounts how the perceived injustices imposed on Germany by the victors
of World War One in the Treaty of Versailles led him to the Nazis but
ultimately acknowledges that the appeal of Hitler took Germany to crime and
ruin.
"I joined the National-Socialist German Workers Party because it fought
against the injustice of Versailles, against the diktat, against occupation,
against national shame, against the plunder of land," Eichmann wrote.
"And what did we bring? Injustice, diktat, occupation, national shame, the
plunder of land."
Eichmann was taken prisoner after World War Two but managed to flee to
Argentina, where he lived under the name of Ricardo Klement with his wife
and three sons.
Israeli secret agents kidnapped him in May 1960 in Buenos Aires. He went on
trial in Jerusalem in April 1961 and was hanged on June 1, 1962. "I had to
obey the law of the war and my flag. I am ready," were his last words.
Eichmann 's writings, which he notes he had wanted published in a
pearl-coloured or dove grey jacket, are accompanied by his last will and
testament. It contains the only explicit apology in some 1,100 handwritten
pages.
"For the work that I leave to be done after my death I can only apologise
and thank those people who will take care of it," Eichmann concludes.
###
ASSOCIATED PRESS 02.29.00
In prison memoir released by Israel, Eichmann plays down his role
By KARIN LAUB
02/29/2000 Associated Press Newswires Copyright 2000. The Associated Press.
All Rights Reserved.
JERUSALEM (AP) - In Adolf Eichmann 's 1961 prison memoir released in full
for the first time by Israel on Tuesday, the overseer of the Holocaust
minimizes his own role, but describes in pedantic detail the workings of the
Nazi death machine.
In the 1,300-page manuscript, penned in precise German Gothic script,
Eichmann portrays himself as a misled idealist and an obedient bureaucrat
who abhorred his frequent trips to the killing fields of Eastern Europe and
drowned his nightmares in alcohol.
Some Israeli historians say the account by Eichmann , who was sentenced to
death in Israel and hanged in 1962, is so self-serving and distorted that it
is historically worthless.
Still, Israel hopes Eichmann 's methodical description of the genocide,
including timetables of death transports, will help undermine the court case
of British historian David Irving, who has challenged the scope of the
Holocaust.
Irving says he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges
the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.
Irving says a book by American professor Deborah Lipstadt maintains that he
denies the Holocaust and distorts statistics. Irving is suing Lipstadt for
libel in a British court, and the Eichmann memoirs will now likely be
entered into evidence.
Eichmann grew up in Austria and joined the Nazi party in 1932, a year before
Hitler came to power in Germany. Eichmann said he fervently believed in
Hitler's promises to wipe out the "shame" of Germany's World War I defeat,
but was never an anti-Semite. As proof, he presented a Jewish boyhood friend
and Jewish relatives by marriage.
In 1936, he was transferred to the "Jewish Department" in the headquarters
of the Nazi security services. He said that at one point, he bought a
booklet, "Hebrew For Everyone," because he was asked to read the newspapers
of Jewish communities, most written in Yiddish with Hebrew lettering.
Eichmann claimed that in the beginning he pushed for "humane solutions,"
such as encouraging Jewish emigration, creating a Jewish protectorate in
Eastern Europe or sending Jews to the island of Madagascar, off Africa.
In 1939, he was put in charge of deporting Jews to Eastern Europe. Eichmann
claimed he had no authority, simply coordinated timetables for trains and
that all decisions were made by his immediate superior, Gestapo chief
Heinrich Mueller.
Soon he was sent by Mueller to the killing fields of Nazi-occupied Eastern
Europe. In January 1942, he arrived in Chelmo, a town in Poland.
"I saw naked Jews, men and women, get into a bus without windows," Eichmann
wrote. "The doors were closed and the motor was started," with poisonous
exhaust fumes pumped inside.
He claimed he was so shocked that he was "unable to carry out Mueller's
order to time how long the killings were taking." The bus was driven to a
nearby pit and the corpses were dumped inside. "Then a civilian jumped into
the pit, checked the mouths and pulled out the gold teeth with pliers,"
Eichmann wrote.
Eichmann said he could never fathom why Mueller kept sending him from
"killing site to killing site." He said he drank heavily on his trips back
to Berlin, red wine from a large flask, if available, or hard liquor, but
was always careful not to get drunk because he was, after all, in uniform.
Eichmann , who was abducted by Israeli agents from his hide-out in Buenos
Aires in 1960, persistently played down his role in the genocide he himself
described as the most enormous crime in human history. He said his job was
just to observe, and that most of the time he was sitting behind a desk in
Berlin, carrying out orders.
Israeli scholars have dismissed Eichmann 's account as a crass distortion.
Yehuda Bauer, a senior researcher at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust
memorial, noted that in an interview Eichmann gave five years before the
trial, the Nazi leader said he regretted he hadn't taken harsher measures
against Jews and that creation of the state of Israel was a catastrophe.
"This is a demon who writes a pitiful justification that repeats his claims
in court," Bauer told Israel army radio.
Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and author on the Holocaust, said Eichmann
probably lied about his own role, but that the document is important
nonetheless. "Here we have a senior official in the Nazi bureaucracy who
describes in great detail the extermination of the Jews," Segev said.
The memoir was locked in the State Archives for nearly four decades because
Israeli leaders feared Holocaust deniers could misuse it.
Several months ago, the Justice Ministry reluctantly agreed to give the
manuscript to a German research institute for eventual publication. However,
when Lipstadt 's attorneys asked for help, Israeli Attorney General Elyakim
Rubinstein agreed to immediate publication.
Segev said the Israeli government mishandled the sensitive documents from
the start.
"The whole thing is very ironic," said Segev. "They (the archives) refused
to give it to us. They said it will serve the purposes of the Holocaust
deniers. Now it is being published to fight the Holocaust deniers."
###
==
Copyright 2000 AAP Information Services Pty. Ltd.
AAP NEWSFEED
February 29, 2000, Tuesday
SECTION: Nationwide General News; Australian General News
LENGTH: 354 words
HEADLINE: fed: Jewish lobby group angered by Darville's Irving story
BODY:
Darville By Chris Herde
BRISBANE, Feb 29 AAP - A Jewish lobby group today accused a magazine of
"cheap sensationalism" for commissioning an article by controversial
author Helen Darville about Nazi historian David Irving.
Darville, who fabricated Ukrainian ancestry as Helen Demidenko for her
first award winning novel amid claims that the book was anti-semetic,
interviewed Irving for Australian Style magazine.
The interview has angered the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs
Council community affairs director Jeremy Jones, who claimed it was a
cynical move to increase sales of the magazine which goes on the news
stands tomorrow.
"It's cheap sensationalism. Helen Darville is notorious as a person who
perpetrated a literary fraud with a book that was widely viewed as
justifying anti-semitism," Mr Jones told AAP today.
"She was then asked by a magazine to go and interview somebody who has a
status in the eyes of many far right wingers as an icon.
"How is the cause of public information served by the combination of
these two personalities."
The interview was conducted in London during a libel case against an
American academic whom Irving, who has been refused a visa to Australia,
is suing for allegedly depicting him as denying the Holocaust and as a
"Hitler partisan".
However Australian Style editor Jack Marx criticised Mr Jones' stand,
claiming there was "no gimmick involved" and he would use Darville for
other articles.
"It's a totally expected kneejerk reaction by a bunch of people who are
pro-censorship," Marx said.
"The article is balanced and anyone who reads it will see that she pokes
holes through many of Irving's arguments.
"She is actually quite knowledgable about the topic."
Darville, who now lives in London and was not contactable, won the Miles
Franklin award for her book, The Hand That Signed The Paper.
A few years ago Darville apologised for claiming Ukrainian ancestry
saying she was sorry if her book or actions were perceived as
anti-semitic.
She said she condemned without reservation the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.

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